Archives for March 2011

Politicians say stupid things all the time. There’s a reason why the political arena is often called “Hollywood for ugly people.”

Some think Barack Obama is a President “rock star.” These same people probably told Charlie Sheen he has Adonis DNA.

The intelligence bar has been set rather low by actors, reported to say stupid things all the time. What do you expect when someone makes a living by saying words written by others?

Not much.

The real question is, what did Congress expect when they asked Jane Fonda or Sissy Spacek to testify before Congress about the plight of farmers because they played a farmer in a movie? Perhaps Steven Colbert put an end to that celebrity “expert” testimony nonsense once and for all by properly mocking it.

For the record, it really doesn’t bother me all that much when an actor says something stupid. They aren’t paid to be smart. They are paid to look good and sound convincing as they follow the script.

When politicians say stupid things, it really bothers me. These people have great power to adversely affect my life. I want politicians who are smarter than me, not richer and prettier.

When Republican Christine O’Donnell bought a television ad to announce “I am not a witch” or Democrat Nancy Pelosi stood before the national media and declared, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it,” my head wanted to explode.

Don’t forget my most favorite stupid quote from Harry Reid,

The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.

They might not be (mental) giants.

But stupid is one thing, vicious quite another. The Hill reported Joe Biden’s remarks at a political fundraiser a couple of days ago where he made an analogy of Republican budget maneuvers to excusing the actions of rapists go beyond the pale to qualify as some of the most vile, disgusting, and inflammatory political attacks of the last fifty years.

The vice president compared Republican budget cuts to rape because in his words,

there was this attitude in our society of blaming the victim. When a woman got raped, blame her because she was wearing a skirt too short, she looked the wrong way or she wasn’t home in time to make the dinner.

And that compares to reduced spending and lower taxes how, exactly?

Biden explained,

[The Republicans] whose philosophy threw us into this God-awful hole we’re in, gave us the tremendous deficit we’ve inherited – that they’re now using, now attempting to use, the very economic condition they have created to blame the victim – whether it’s organized labor or ordinary middle-class working men and women. It’s bizarre. It’s bizarre.

No, Mr. Biden, what’s bizarre is your rationale.

And it’s really scary to know that you think this way, considering you’re only a heartbeat away from becoming President.

Joe obviously believes we’re all idiots. He trusts that we don’t remember Democrats were calling the shots when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac imploded largely because of the myth that Congress can somehow create affordable housing.

The only thing Congress knows how to make is a mess.

Don’t get me wrong — Republicans aren’t completely blameless. They didn’t prevent the carnage from happening and they haven’t undone the damage. They’re currently reduced to bickering with the Obama administration about who can cut spending more.

I personally don’t care. Cut government spending! Today!

Our VP must think we believe him when he implies only union employees work for a living. Many of us in the private sector (constituting a large majority of the voting populace) understand that the easiest way to ruin a person’s incentive to work hard is to have them join a union.

Unionized workers immediately gain protections through collective bargaining that ultimately prevent incompetent people from being fired. Good, hard working union members suffer because of the bums in their midst that give them all a bad reputation.

Biden has compared one of the worst things a human being can do to another person — the violent act of rape — to a reduction of pay and benefits to union employees. Calling union thugs currently making death threats to Republicans “victims” would have been hilarious, if the context had been different.

I find nothing amusing about rape.

Diminishing the victims of violent crime for political gain is truly sickening. Above all people, the champion of the Violence Against Women Act should know better.

You simply cannot compare violent crimes like rape or murder to spending cuts or lower taxes. That’s going way too far over the line.

This sort of bombastic speech is inciting the worst kind of hatred in America. The only thing it can possibly achieve would be to start class warfare between people artificially separated by greed.

This is exactly the sort of rhetoric that will ultimately breed violence…just like that perpetrated by the lunatic Jared Loughner.

Friends who engage me in a discussion that turns political often fall prey to the misconception that I am some sort of right wing Republican.

Perhaps I made some reference to a remark by Rush Limbaugh or mentioned a story seen on Fox News.

I do listen to Rush periodically and I do prefer Fox News. Does this make me some sort of ideologue?

What about when I’m reading Camille Paglia, the Huffington Post, the U.K. Daily Mail, or some information source decidedly more liberal? If you really want “fair and balanced” and you don’t trust the media, do it yourself.

It has bothered me that ever since achieving a qualified age, in Georgia I must declare a party affiliation in order to vote in the primary. I can vote either way in the general election, but for primaries I must choose sides.

I am not a Republican. I am not a Democrat. I am an American. My symbol is not “D” or “R”, but “USA.”

I am not strictly a conservative, but fiscally conservative and socially a libertarian — kind of like a liberal who hates Big Government.

There are reasons I’m not a Democrat.

Obamacare might even be the point of no return where I never support a “D” no matter how conservative the candidate.

It isn’t that we, the general public, want to “screw” the public sector unions of what they were promised in the past or deprive people of health care.

The simple truth is that we don’t have the money. We must elect politicians with enough backbone to admit that entitlement spending has destroyed our economy and the only way to fix it is to reduce spending. It’s that simple.

If you don’t have it, you don’t spend it. We’re borrowing from China so the government can give away money like it came from a game of Monopoly.

Republicans like Miami mayor Carlos Alvarez immediately come to mind. In a dismal economy where home values have fallen precipitously. Alvarez forced through a 14% increase in property taxes, ostensibly to “protect” public service workers like police and firemen, but he funded raises for public sector employees and supported spending $350 million in tax revenue to move the Marlins to Little Havana.

Businessman Norman Braman led a recall effort, and Alvarez has been thrown out of office by 88% of his constituents. Mr. Braman spent $1 million of his own money to throw the bum out.

Norman Braman is my hero du jour.

In the midst of all this destruction, Democrats are squealing like stuck pigs at the slightest reduction in government spending. Harry Reid’s infamous appeal to preserve funding of a cowboy poetry festival is stunningly absurd.

Had George W. Bush declared “had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist,” the mainstream media would have had a field day.

It’s not about party affiliation. It’s about the money, and it’s about time for government to stop wasteful and unnecessary spending.

In my rarely humble opinion, birthers are a kind of conspiracy nut. They believe that Barack Obama became POTUS without actually being a natural-born citizen, a requirement for holding the office as stipulated by the U.S. Constitution.

Surely Hillary Clinton would have discovered the truth and exposed Obama, assuming the slightest shred of evidence existed showing proof he’s not a natural-born citizen. Even if she was only pretty sure. Democrats haven’t been known to be sticklers for details before making reckless accusations.

And Hillary really wanted to be president. Therefore, I disagree with Donald Trump.

I think it’s a waste of time and possibly a diversion to question Obama’s citizenship. Let’s concentrate on the damage he’s doing as President. That ought to be plenty to keep the second coming of Jimmy Carter from re-election.

If Republicans are worried they will be called racist, allow me to attempt to set the collective minds at ease.

You’re going to be called racists, bigots, homophobes, and any other vile term of character assassination by people who have none. Get over it.

Championing the birther claim is a non starter, in my opinion.

If Republicans really want to counter the racism claim in the next general election, they could draft a ticket of two excellent black conservative such as Allen West and Herman Cain.

I don’t care which has the top job: both are black, conservative, smart, and no B.S. kind of people. Either would make a better President than Obama.

The Democrats have friends in the media helping them as much as possible. Political cartoonist Mike Luckovich from the Atlanta Journal Constitution chose to illustrate the lunacy of birthers by comparing them to that sad human train-wreck, Charlie Sheen.

Luckovich made an extraordinarily poor choice of a candidate to make birthers look bad by comparison. Charlie Sheen is a truther.

Truthers don’t get the attention of the mainstream media as much as birthers do. They are to Democrats what birthers are to Republicans and the mainstream media favors Democrats in their coverage.

For whatever reason, the media doesn’t like us to fixate on the lunatic fringe of the left. Of course, almost half the Democrat party actually suspect President George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance and did nothing to stop them, looking for an excuse to go to war with Iraq.

They forget Afghanistan came first.

Truthers believe our own government conducted the actual terrorist attacks on September 11th or conspired with the killers.

One of their favorite movies is called Zeitgeist. It pretends to be a documentary boasting that it proves banks steal our money, Jesus was a mythical person and 9/11 was an inside job.

Well, okay…banks do steal our money.

That means Zeitgeist is only batting .333 for “truth”, a good average for baseball but not for a documentary purporting to be truthful and accurate.

Another favorite movie of the Democrat conspiracy nut crowd is called Loose Change.

Same song, different tune. America is run by the evil bad corporate thugs who prey on the innocent union worker, and the Muslim terrorists were framed.

The people who beheaded Nicholas Berg while he was still alive were simply scapegoats — in the minds of the leftist loony tunes.

For too long, I’ve been cowed into submission. I’ve been afraid to speak my mind for fear of being called a racist.

As a “white” male who’s basically spent my entire life in the Deep South, it’s more or less assumed I’m racist if I say anything that can possibly be construed as negative about a black person. If I oppose Barack Obama for re-election, I’ll be called a racist. Will it matter if I support Lt. Colonel Allen West or Herman Cain instead?

For the record, I would vote for either of them in a heartbeat. How can you not love West’s straight talk? And Cain looks serious about running for president.

If both men run, I’m really going to have a tough time making a decision.

Over the years, it’s been my experience to meet some of the nicest people I’ve known, and their skin color is considerably darker than mine. I used to go so far to refer to these friends as “black”, but soon discovered that to many people, the term is politically incorrect. Too lazy and stubborn to say “African American”, I often find myself in a quandary on how to describe my friends who naturally exhibit a darker hue.

I’ve sort of gotten away from using any sort of descriptor.

I’ve come to decide there is no “us” and “them”. Black and white differentiation is largely irrelevant. We are the same species, no different physiologically.

Our blood is interchangeable. During a transfusion, one doesn’t get blood sorted by skin color but blood type. It really is time to move past this hangup about skin color.

That’s why several recent events involving public officials and one politically correct movement to edit classic literature all struck me as politically correct madness. The first incident that caught my attention originated in my hometown of Savannah, Georgia.

The black mayor of Savannah, Otis Johnson, was publicly quoted to have said “It’s our turn now” by white council members when reports were leaked that interim city manager Rochelle Small-Toney could not obtain a required bond. When offered the opportunity to refute the charge, the mayor responded:

Well I may have said it. I can’t remember everything that I say. I may have said it, but so what.

Alice Massimi of WSAV followed Johnson’s quote by saying, “An attitude (like) that can either unite this city or continue to divide it.”

Her rather vacuous observation would have been humorous if Johnson’s remark weren’t so disturbing.

With all due respect, that kind of comment won’t ever unite anybody.

Regarding Ms. Small-Toney’s qualifications for city manager, they are twofold — first is the question whether a more qualified candidate was denied a chance because of the color of his skin. My second concern is the fact her pay exceeds what the governor receives by quite a bit.

Seriously…is the CEO of a city with a population of around 250,000 people worth fifty thousand dollars more than the governor of the entire state?

More recently, Eric Holder — the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder — has been reported by Politico to have described criticism of his handling of the Black Panther voter intimidation case as demeaning to “his people.”

I’m sorry, but the U.S. Attorney General needs to represent not “his” people versus “my” people, but THE people. What the hell is happening in this country?

Finally, this nugget on the Internet suggests editing Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to replace all the references of the “n” word with “robot”. So instead of being a person with dark skin color being treated inhumanly…as a possession and not a person, these idiots want to make Jim a real possession and completely dehumanize him. It would alter Twain’s whole moral lesson about a boy torn between betraying his friend or society, rendering it lost forever in translation.

Don’t get me wrong. If it would permanently repair race relations in this country, I’d be all for banning the “n” word forever.

But if we’re going to edit a classic to eradicate the word, let’s really get rid of it.

Chris Rock will have to completely rewrite his skit “N— versus black people” or stop performing it completely.

All copies of Richard Pryor’s classic album That N—‘s Crazy must be destroyed. That’s too bad.